“What’s wrong?” the 8-year-old boy asked the kid living next door to him on Blake Avenue in Brooklyn, across the street from Public School 175.

It was early February, 1943, and the Western Union boy was peddling his bike out of the neighborhood as fast as he could. Like a posse was chasing him.

Nobody wanted to see that uniformed, delivery boy riding his bike down their street. World War II was at its peak, and he was making minimum wage — 40 cents an hour — delivering horrible news to people.

A young “Grim Reaper” riding a bike, they called him.

Schwartz thinks it was the Gross family that got the bad news that day 71 years ago. There were other families living on his block who got that knock on the door, too.

The woman living in the ground floor flat opened her front door, and saw the Western Union kid standing on her stoop holding a telegram that had ripped the hearts out of thousands of mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers in this country.

“The Navy Department deeply regrets to inform you,” it began.

Her son had been one of 672 soldiers and sailors who died when the USAT Dorchester, an Army transport, sunk off the coast of Greenland after being torpedoed by a German submarine.

She dropped the telegram and let out a wail. Her son was gone. There would be no Norman Rockwell homecoming for him.

“Within minutes, the whole neighborhood was talking about it,” said Schwartz, who went on to serve three years combat duty during the Korean War. “You saw mothers crying up and down the block.”

They all saw their son’s and brother’s name on that telegram.

It was only later Schwartz, who lives in Santa Clarita, learned about the four Army chaplains who also lost their lives on the Dorchester that day — how they became memorialized forever in U.S. military history.

In 1988, Congress declared Feb. 3 “Four Chaplains Day,” but it slipped by earlier this week with hardly a mention in the news, and that’s been bothering Jerry Schwartz.

No, don’t let it go, Schwartz is telling me. Shut up, pay respect, and remember. So we do because he’s right.

A war-weary country gave the four chaplains their own day in history. It gave them a U.S. postage stamp in their honor, and stained glass windows in the halls of power and respect.

Their story is too important and poignant to be passed over. It needs to be delivered, and not by Western Union. The more the years slip by, the more we tend to forget. The other guys could have won.

The military history books tell us it was an icy dawn that February morning when the Dorchester — an old ship hastily pressed into service as a troop transport — was battling angry, North Atlantic seas with 902 American servicemen bound for Greenland.

Only 230 would make it, and they weren’t in any condition to fight.

A Nazi submarine had been stalking the ship, and now, with the Dorchester in sight of land and her protective convoy gone, it struck — sending a torpedo into the old ship’s flank.

It exploded in the boiler room, killing the kid living on Blake Avenue, and a lot of his buddies.

Panic spread through the ship as everyone desperately tried to reach the deck to see how bad it was. The four chaplains were already there trying to calm everyone down.

George Fox was a Methodist minister, John Washington, a Catholic priest. Alexander Goode was a Jewish rabbi, and Clark Poling, a Dutch Reformed minister. They moved about the sinking ship handing out life jackets and helping injured soldiers toward the life boats.

When the order came to abandon ship, they had already exhausted the supply of life jackets available, and there were still four sailors left who needed one. The four chaplains took off theirs, and gave them to the young men.

Then, they locked arms, bowed their heads in prayer, and went down with the ship together. A Hollywood movie, right? No, the real thing.

They never asked the men they gave their life jackets to if they were Jewish, Protestant, or Catholic. It didn’t matter. And that’s at the heart of the story of the four chaplains.

When the end came for these brave men of different faiths they never asked. They just locked arms and prayed. They knew they were all going to the same place.

The chaplains were awarded the Purple Heart and Distinguished Cross medals in 1944, and later a Medal of Valor and Special Medal for Heroism by the U.S. Congress.

A postage stamp honoring them was issued in 1948, and stained glass windows depicting their faces were installed at the Pentagon, West Point, and the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. There is a local display in their honor aboard the Queen Mary in Long Beach.

And thanks to Jerry Schwartz — we may be a few days late — but we remember the Four Chaplains, the kid from Brooklyn, and all the others aboard the USS Dorchester who died that day.

Dennis McCarthy’s column runs on Friday. He can be reached for story ideas and comments at dmccarthynews@gmail.com.

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